Technology

In the 50's they thought we would have intellegent robot butlers by the 70's. They had solved more structured problems that seemed hard, like chess, and figured language and simple physical tasks couldn't be much different. They came up with some hacky chatbots and things in the 20th century, but it was all cheap tricks like strategically changing the subject - I talked to these things enough to tell. ChatGPT passes basically every test of short-term language reasoning we can throw at it. It's solved the problem for really basic purposes. It can take your Wendy's order without any fine-tuning.

Alright, I'm going to respond to the rest of this in quip-like fashion, since you've touched on a lot of separate-ish points here, but the tone intended is still neutral.

Image recognition was great beginning the late 2010s.

That was literally the same tech we're talking about here, just earlier and with a slightly different structure.

For instance, machine translation and spam detection (document classification) were getting really good by the late 2000s.

You and me have different memories of older machine translation. It could replace words and a few phrases fine, but it broke or produced awkward phrasings very often. It didn't engage with the underlying meanings at all. Spam detection worked well, but not similarly smart, and IIRC in some case was neural nets again.

violating copyright,

Disagree.

It can also be somewhat useful as a search engine so long as you want your answer to be authoritatively worded but don’t care if it’s true or not.

Or if the answer is easily verifiable, like it has been in my own cases.

Stealing “the properties of women” is BS, since back then women had no right to ownership;

That is not quite right. Married women had no property. Plenty of unmarried women had property, and with-hunting was a for-profit legalised industry of robbing these vulnerable women. But European history isn't really the point so let's move on.

I don't think your description of a tulip market is quite right. The point of the tulip market is just that the tulip itself has no inherent value other than the expectation that someone else will buy it for more. This has similar properties to an MLM in that eventually, the person at the end of the chain (holding the "hot potato") is out of luck. And I wouldn't say that is how all markets work, either. Healthy markets are built on products of value, not speculation.

Crypto is as profitable as USD

This is a minor point but note that holding USD is not profitable, due to inflation. This is a key difference between crypto and regular currencies. Crypto becomes more scarce over time and so will trend toward becoming more valuable, while the dollar becomes less valuable. Becoming less valuable is a good desirable trait because it encourages people to spend money and actually get the economy moving, rather than hoarding and speculating.

You seem to me like you've drunk at least a little of the cyber-libertarian kool-aid. If so, we'll probably not see eye-to-eye any time soon. But I'll try to give you a gist of my perspective on the whole affair and you can make of it what you will. The block chain does not offer any substantial benefit as a virtual currency over a regular database, as we have been using for decades. Systems like Steam's inventory, Neopets collectible pets and World of Warcraft have been creating virtual currencies that worked perfectly long before crypto came along, and without accelerating global warming by using a small country's worth of power to do it.

You will doubtless respond that decentralisation is the difference that the Block Chain brings along, the value offering. But no-one actually runs their own wallets. If Steam Inventory were using a block chain nothing would change in practice whatsoever because I'd just have a wallet stored and managed by Steam, and access it through a web interface just as I do now with Steam Inventory which is backed by a regular database. It would just be an implementation detail that makes no difference to the actual end-user, who is never going to run their own wallet.

Trust is brought about by regulation and insurance. I know my money is safe because my bank is backed by my country's central bank, and decades of regulations protecting my investments. With crypto the idea is that trust is guaranteed by the block chain, but again no-one actually runs their own wallets because it is a pain in the butt to do so. So what happens in practice is that you store your wallet with some third-party provider that can later run off with your money with minimal consequences or gets hacked and in either case you don't get your money back. Both of these scenarios have happened numerous times as I'm sure you must be aware, I hope I don't need to cite them here.

This isn't difficult to figure out, everyone that seriously looks at crypto knows it doesn't really have any practical use-case beyond money laundering and black markets. So why all the paragraphs and paragraphs of libertarian ideological banter about how Bitcoin will usher in a new age of peace and prosperity and fix all the world's problems etcetera etcetera? Because that is a great way of scamming people, and that is what crypto is at the end of the day. All the folks telling you to "hodl" and creating mountains of memes about how great it is to hold bitcoin and wait, were only doing so in the hope that the people who ate that nonsense up would be daft enough to hold during the next crash, which prevents the price from falling too far and enables the more Machiavellian crypto holders to cash out.

That's the really sad part of the whole affair. I think there are a number of people who genuinely drink the libertarian kool-aid and think that Bitcoin et al are somehow going to bring about a brave new world, and they're ultimately just being played for fools by the scam artists who peddle that crap without believing any of it.

What the libertarian dream has achieved is the same thing it always does, it causes exactly the problems regulation is intended to prevent. Insider trading occurs in at least 25% and possibly up to half of all crypto listings. Billions of dollars are stolen by scammers. Banks scamming their own customers (Which, funnily enough, was resolved quite neatly because of precisely the regulations that libertarians want to avoid).

Alright I'm tired. This is just a rant not an essay, you can take it or leave it. Nothing is proof-read. I don't really have a conclusion other than to say once again that crypto is a scam perpetrated by nasty horrible bad selfish people that are harming society and the planet.